Letter: Registering guns is a bad idea

Posted: January 14, 2013 - 1:16am

Revealing the names of gun owners is a big help to criminals because it lets them know who probably doesn’t own guns and whose homes are unprotected. The only thing that keeps non-gun owners safe in their homes is the bad guys don’t know which homes have guns.

Non-gun owners should be outraged when the names of gun owners are revealed because it ups the chance they will be invaded at some point. Revealing the names of gun owners tells the criminals which homes are the safest to invade.

It is clear all databases are subject to being “hacked” and the data stolen. It is the number one reason not to have to register guns.

One does not have to be the sharpest knife in the drawer to understand it's far more dangerous to invade a home or business that is protected with firearms. As well-trained as our police force is, police are outnumbered and cannot always respond in time to help those in need.

Governments that seek to enslave their citizens have always sought to disarm them first. Requiring registration of all firearms is the first step in the process of total disarmament.

“I ask, Sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.” — George Mason, co-author of the Second Amendment

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We must never succumb to gun registration or licensing because we cannot predict how these registries would be used in the future. Great Britain began their gun control with simple licenses and look where they ended up.

First off, the proposals that have been made apply to purchases of firearms and not to the arms one has.

Second, it is an NRA myth that owning guns drives away burglars. Au contraire, guns are an attractant to burglars, especially with the prices guns are bringing now. According to the Justice Department Bureau of Statistics, 232,000 guns are stolen annually in the USA. Our stolen guns arm not only our own criminals but those in Mexico. Mr. Kyle has it reversed. If you are on a public gun owner's list, you have a target painted on your house and vehicle.

Third, it is statistically more likely that a gun owner will shoot himself or family than shoot a burglar. There are something like 60,000 shootings a year in the USA and few of those involve the shooting of a burglar or assailant.

Fourth, A colonist in 1776 had access to muskets and rifles that were as good or better than those carried by the British. There is no way that Americans today can fight against our own or any oppressive government armed with modern weapons. Fantasy. Now if Bert and Mr. Kyle can get the laws changed where we can legally buy machine guns and grenades and RPGs and Stinger missiles...

[An RPG is a great equalizer. A great weapon for the people. You can take out about any armored vehicle with one and there was a story that one was used to destroy an M1A1 Abrams tank in Iraq, by a shot from behind through the thinnest armor on the tank. Arm every American with a couple of RPGs and we can change the world.]

Fifth, the NRA feeds on fantasy and misinformation. Their motto ought to be, "NRA, We Sell the Dream."

Better keep that rifle loaded and handy for those pesky, black helicopters. If they're not already circling your house, they will be soon; especially since you've made a public outcry via this letter to the AJ.

The Pistols Act of 1903: Pistol sales to minors and felons were forbidden, and the act dictated that sales be made only to buyers with a gun license. The license itself could be obtained at the post office, the only requirement being payment of a fee.

Firearms Act of 1920: Britons who had formerly enjoyed a right to arms were now allowed to possess pistols and rifles only if they proved they had "good reason" for receiving a police permit. Shotguns and airguns, which were perceived as "sporting" weapons, remained exempt from British government control. Within Great Britain, a "firearms certificate" for possession of rifles or handguns was readily obtainable. Wanting to possess a firearm for self-defense was considered a "good reason" for being granted a firearms certificate.

In response to the Bodkin Committee, the British government in 1936 enacted legislation to outlaw (with a few minor exceptions) possession of short-barreled shotguns and fully automatic firearms. The government explained its actions by arguing that automatics were crime guns in the United States and there was no legitimate reason for civilians to possess them.

Starting in 1936 the British police began adding a requirement to Firearms Certificates that the guns be stored securely. As shotguns were not licensed, there was no such requirement for them.

In 1946, the Home Secretary announced a policy change: henceforth, self-defense would not be considered a good reason for being granted a Firearms Certificate.

As the post-1920 generation grew up, the licensing provisions of the Firearms Act began to seem less like a change from previous conditions and more like part of ordinary social circumstances.

The Criminal Justice Act of 1967 required a license for the purchase of shotguns. Once the shotgun certificate was granted, the law allowed a citizen to purchase as many shotguns as he wished. Private transfers among certificate holders were legal and uncontrolled. As with the Firearms Act of 1920, the statutory language of the 1967 shotgun law was eminently reasonable, and unobjectionable except to a civil liberties purist.

In response to the 1987 Hungerford incident, semi-automatic centerfire rifles, which had been legally owned for nearly a century, were banned. Pump-action rifles were banned as well, since it was argued that these guns could be substituted for semi-automatics.

In response to the 1996 Dunblane incident, Prime Minister Major announced that the Conservative government would ban handguns above .22 caliber, and .22 caliber handguns would have to be stored at shooting clubs, not in homes. A few months later, Labour Party leader Tony Blair completed the handgun ban by removing the exemption for .22s.

Under regulations implementing Britain's 1997 Firearms (Amendment) Act, gun club members must now register every time they use a range, and must record which particular gun they use. If the gun-owner does not use some of his legally-registered guns at the range often enough, his permission to own those guns will be revoked.

Gun control in Great Britain now proceeds on two fronts. When a sensational crime takes place, proposals for gun confiscations and for major new restrictions on the licensing system are introduced. During more tranquil times, fees are raised and increased controls are applied to relatively smaller issues. Thanks to decades of such restrictions aimed at restricting entry into the shooting sports, the vast majority of the public has little familiarity with guns. Legal British gun owners now constitute only four percent of total households.

Get it? The USA is a third-world country when it comes to deaths from shootings. I guess we can take pride in the fact that we are one percent behind Mexico and far behind El Salvador.

But Opinionated, what is the relevance in what you said? Nobody has proposed registering all the guns in the USA, and nobody has proposed outlawing ownership!

You seem to think you can pick out a non-existent issue to argue against and then claim you won! Which is an NRA tactic.

We don't have the manpower or logistics to do adequate background checks on purchases of firearms from dealers! Registering or banning all guns would be a logistics and budgetary nightmare about as effective as our "war on drugs" even if it were proposed, -- which it is not -- and would be impossible to pass in even a Democratically controlled legislature.

BTW, the USA has more doctors and hospitals and better trauma care than those countries that have a higher death rate from gunshot.

From which we might infer that if our medical care were on a par with El Salvador, for example, we would move up several steps on the list. Who knows, we might even challenge for #1 in gunshot death rate.

@teshaw: That was never my argument. I was arguing against gun registration at any level because it can result in loss of liberty (as it did in the UK). We cannot let the current generation of politicians make seemingly harmless restrictions that can be used in the future to ban gun ownership.

Obviously, fewer guns results in fewer gun injuries, but that isn't the issue. The right to bear arms is in our Constitution. If you want to further restrict gun ownership, repeal the Second Amendment. The process is well-documented with an example provided via Amendment XXI.

Also, please explain how Mexico's gun-related death rate is so high when they have some of the strictest gun control laws in the world.

Not entirely accurate. There's also that that pesky old Supreme Court, and those robed rogues are tasked with interpretting the constitution. Here's what they said in 2008:

"Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons. Pp. 54–56."

More restrictions are definitely constitutional. The question is which ones would be both helpful and practical.

has protections in it that the Brits never dreamed of. Did you know that a British citizen can get in trouble for hate language, which seems to be broadly interpreted? They don't have the equivalent of our second amendment, so their laws can be very restrictive. While they may not have the gun deaths that we have, however, they do have crimes against persons and property. Those crimes can be carried out with impunity by the criminals because there is no way to defend oneself. I looked at the rape rate in France the other day. It was higher than the U.S. I think Britain's was lower, but not by a great deal. The other developed countries also have a completely different social safety net for their citizens. Thus, they don't have the inner-city war zones that we do.

"Also, please explain how Mexico's gun-related death rate is so high when they have some of the strictest gun control laws in the world."

Sharing a porous border with the USA has a lot to do with that. Drugs move north into the USA and money and arms move south into Mexico.

This resembles the false argument made today by Gingrich and others today. Gun control laws in certain U.S. cities do not stop the inflow of guns. The highways up from Florida to D.C. and NYC are called "the iron highways" because of the volume of guns flowing into cities that restrict gun purchases or ownership. This is not an effective argument against federal, nationwide gun legislation.

The USA is gun rich in terms of firearms privately owned or manufactured. Mexico and Canada are gun-poor. By the law of diffusion, arms travel from where they are in greater concentration to lesser.

Narrowly construed (by "strict construction"), the 2nd Amendment stands for the principle that militiamen may have flintlock rifles and muskets, which, I remind you, are single shot. But we have no militiamen today because we have a standing army and National Guard, which I suggest to you are unconstitutional to strict constructionists.

Disband the army and National Guard and restore the USA to the way it was 200+years ago and there may be an argument that the 2nd Amendment provides for private ownership of military style weapons.

Why are Americans forbidden to have machine guns, cannon, mortars and grenades? Why is the line drawn between semiautomatic weapons and full automatic? Where do you stand on that?

Back to the UK. Hardly a totalitarian society. I think in the general run of nations, the UK is among the most free. Can't see how their gun laws have hurt them.

Does anyone think that Russia, the Phillippines, and Kenya have a far lower rape incidence than Belgium and New Zealand? Or that rape is vanishingly rare in Egypt except where western journalistas are caught in mobs?

So many issues including culture and faith in law enforcement and court procedures cloud the statistics. It's hard to conclude anything at all. You probably could compare Sweden to Denmark but that's about it.

In general, higher incidence of reported rapes means more sympathetic police and a fairer judicial system.

Seems to me that the bottom line in many of the arguments is this: correlation does not equal causation, and anecdotes are not evidence. One of the most encouraging things I've seen is that the President might lift restrictions on government funded studies of gun violence. Let the professionals do their jobs, and treat gun violence as a public health issue. If the NRA was really interested in gun safety, they'd support this, instead of opposing it as they have for the last decade.

Your explanation of why selective gun control never works further proves my point. Placing more restrictions on the legal purchase and ownership of firearms will never keep them out of the hands of criminals (or potential criminals as in the case of Sandy Hook)..... unless, like the UK, we practically ban all guns.

As a libertarian, I am not in favor of stripping liberty from the masses to potentially prevent a small minority from committing crime. Living in a free society carries risks.

Also, I do not believe the founding fathers intended to limit our arms to "flintlock rifles and muskets," but rather anything necessary to fight off a repressive government. After all, it was Thomas Jefferson who stated "When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."

Before you bring in the argument of Texans fighting off Army Blackhawks with AR-15s, remember it often only takes the potential of stiff resistance to stave off conflict entirely. We can keep the government in check in numbers.

Also, please show me where the constitution says anything about arming the people to fight their own government. It does not.

This is maybe the 100th time I posted this here, but the Supreme Court disagrees with you. Scalia, writing for the majority, said:

"Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues."

I also am rather libertarian, and I am not a touchy feely yuppy who thinks kids should be taught nonviolence. If it were not for the NRA and so many misstatements about guns I might be on the other side.

What characterizes human beings is that we make and use tools and weapons. From childhood, without being taught, we are fascinated by weapons, which is both our pride and our curse.

Weapons are not neutral objects. There is a psychic interplay between weapons and the humans who use them. A weapon is much more than a thing. It is power, independence, security, self-expression. Vengeance. A statement. An image. A fantasy lover. Taken a little bit too far, a gun is an accomplice and instigator of mass murder. Most of us don't go that far, though we may think about it.

Much of the appeal of guns is in the fantasy and the image, just as the fantasy of Cary Grant or the Marlboro Man sold a million cigarettes.

Sure I agree with you that there is no way to prevent mass shootings. Not 100%. Banning all guns won't do it, because a ban will be no more effective than our drug laws are. But...

But we can reduce the number of mass shootings. Restoring the ban on high capacity magazines won't get rid of all high capacity magaines, but it will make it just a little harder to obtain them. Banning the sale of assault rifles wont get rid of assault rifles, but will make it a bit harder to obtain one.

Smaller capacity clips mean more reloading, more clips to carry and get confused over, fewer victims.

And this: clip size is part of the emotional appeal of the weapon. The more shots the gun holds, the sexier and more potent and the greater the utility as a fantasy weapon.

And sure, you can commit mass murder without an assault rifle with a banana clip of 30 rounds or a Glock holding 16+ rounds. But the assault rifle and the Glock are sexy, seductresses dressed in black negligees, ready for action. Double barrel shotguns and bolt action deer rifles and snubby revolvers are un-sexy, unworthy of the fantasy though they can dance nearly as well.

I am enjoying this conversation and think we may have stumbled upon common ground. Many gun owners definitely fantasize about their weapons and their potential use. I'll even buy your argument about so-called assault rifles being more attractive to the type of personality that might misuse them. However, none of these are valid reasons for knee-jerk emotional legislative responses to rare tragedies like Sandy Hook.

Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine frames the argument better than I ever could...

"Once you strip away the raw emotionalism of the carnage at Sandy Hook, or the Aurora theater, or Columbine, or Luby's, or whatever, you're left with a series of inconvenient truths for gun-control advocates: Over the past 20 years or so, more guns are in circulation and violent crime is down. So is violent crime that uses guns. Murders are down, too, even as video games and movies and music and everything else are filled with more fantasy violence than ever. For god's sake, even mass shootings are not becoming more common. If ever there was a case to stand pat in terms of public policy, the state of gun control provides it (and that's without even delving into the fact that Supreme Court has recently validated a personal right to own guns in two landmark cases)."
(http://reason.com/archives/2013/01/15/jon-stewart-sandy-hook)

OK, I visited that website which is a blog, looking for facts to support what the author claims: " Over the past 20 years or so, more guns are in circulation and violent crime is down. So is violent crime that uses guns. Murders are down, too, even as video games and movies and music and everything else are filled with more fantasy violence than ever."

Wow! He included embedded links in those statements. But, here is the problem, those embedded links just refer back to earlier blogs--not real data.

And, so you see, the problem I have with blogs and bloggers is they refer to each other for the gospel truth, and go no further to promote whatever it is they are trying to promote.

Now if you have been paying very close attention to the news, the real statistics from government studies about gun crimes--anything about guns, has been blocked in Congress by the NRA lobby.

And as for gun studies being blocked by the NRA, here is one published by the CDC that "...found insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of any of the firearms laws or combinations of laws reviewed on violent outcomes." http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5214a2.htm

The problem with gun laws, as noted by the CDC in the study referenced above, is that lawmakers never actually analyze their effectiveness.

Mother Jones seems to have done about the best compilation of recent mass shootings. See the link in the WP article.

5. WE are becoming less violent. See Opinionated's link on violent crimes in the USA and the WP blog on that. And fewer of us own guns as a percentage of population. So a correlation might be drawn there between a falling percentage of gun owners and lower numbers of murders. Or it may be socialization or more effective police work and deterrence.

6. Seems to me that mass shootings --rampage shootings -- are a new phenomenon, occurring in the past 50-60 years. To an extent they are weapon-enabled. Obviously you can't have a mass shooter using a black powder rifle. Casualties are limited with a lever-action or six shooter. Mass mass shootings of the type that make the news are only feasible with larger magazines.

7. What is really interesting are those school slashings in China, where an adult runs amok, slashing and killing children. There have been at least two of those recently. The psychology of that ought to be very significant as we look at our school shootings. (Also, there have been mass slashings in Japan, though I recall none at schools.)

There are about 30,000 annual gun-related deaths in the United States with about half being suicides. Annually, there are also about 30,000 deaths each attributed to accidental falls, motor vehicle accidents, and accidental poisoning. Why isn't there similar outrage and demands for legislation to prevent these deaths as well?

I agree with some of what Fox says. But it is not all that favorable to firearms. Basically he is saying that there are so many shooting deaths that each mass shooting incident is a minor blip that is soon submerged among all the other firearms deaths.

Definitely true of children. In the USA, something over 100 children per year are murdered by a firearm. Another 500 or so are accidentally shot and killed. So that's about 600 per year. (I have links somewhere or you can Google them up.)

During the Obama administration, some 2500 children were shot to death. That didn't bother this or any other administration until 20 were killed in one whack. I agree, it is not logical to get stirred up over 20 while ignoring the thousands.

However, that is hardly supportive of the position that guns are good and should not be regulated.

Accidental gun-related deaths are tragic but hardly the fault of the firearm. I am in favor of laws holding gun owners accountable for what happens when they carelessly leave their weapons available for children to access. This is common sense regulation that even the gun-friendly Texas government passed.

If a parent left their child in a running vehicle, and the child drove off resulting in a fatal accident, we would not clamor for legislation to limit vehicle sales. Instead we would hold the parent accountable for leaving a potential weapon in the hands of a child.

Controlling access to firearms on a large public scale is not good policy. This only prevents law-abiding citizens from protecting themselves and their families from the criminals who will obtain firearms illegally.

There's a nifty little sig p290 on craigslist right now. No background check is required for that sale -- anyone can buy it, legally. Anyone.

Where do you think all the guns used in the cities like Detroit come from? They don't sell 'em there. Those weapons are bought at gun shows and from private individuals in the southern states. We supply the illicit gun market, unfettered.

Conservatives used to believe that freedom comes responsibility. A few still do.

"They don't sell 'em there," and "We supply the illicit gun market, unfettered" yet Michigan has a higher gun homicide rate than we do. How is this possible if the guns are to blame?

And, as stated previously, I am libertarian, not conservative. I do no wish to pass legislation for my own gain as both liberals and conservatives do, but rather protect individual liberty by limiting government action. Individual liberty demands individual responsibility. My right to gun ownership should not be limited to potentially prevent some individual from committing a crime with their firearm.

How come the Second Amendment dated 1789 when all firearms were single shot and took at least 45 seconds to reload gives us the right to buy an assault rifle that can fire thirty or more shots without reloading?

If you say it does, what would Judge Bork have thought of that?

If the Second Amendment allows us to buy an assault rifle with long magazine, how come we are not allowed to buy a standard military issue rifle that has full automatic fire?

Doesn't the Second Amendment let us own whatever is current military issue whether it's a machine gun or ray gun or explosive bullet?

And yeah how come we can't own working missile launchers and grenade launchers? Isn't it unconstitutional to keep us from buying them? What does the NRA say?